In telephone networks with resistively powered telephone lines, the line current is determined by the pole voltage of a feed battery, the line resistance and the resistance of feed resistors through which the line is connected to the feed battery. The strength of the line current and also that of the transmitted speech signal will be lesser the longer the telephone line is. The telephone sets connected to the network sense the line current and amplify the speech signal so that the sound apprehended by the subscriber obtains the desired strength irrespective of the line length. In feeding power to telephone lines from electronic line circuits, the voltage characteristic of the resistively fed telephone network is imitated. An example of this kind of electronic line circuit is described in "Ericsson Review", No 4 1983, on pages 192-200, in the article "Line Circuit Component SLIC for AXE10", by A. Rydin and J. Sundvall. It is desirable that the power losses in the line circuits will be small, and low battery voltages are therefore used. The result of this is, however, that only short telephone lines can be powered as described in the reference. To avoid this problem, the electronic line circuit may be equipped with a means for restricting the line current so that a weakened speech signal can always be transmitted on a long telephone line. It is known here to allow this restriction to be dependent on the battery voltage, to enable transmission of a speech signal of full strength for as long lines as possible. This brings with it the disadvantage that a variation in battery voltage affects the power supply and constitutes an interference of the transmitted speech signal.